Effective theory of dark matter direct detection

Riccardo Catena, Chalmers (Göteborg)

About five-sixths of all matter in the Universe remain hidden from our view and behave like a dissipation-less fluid called dark matter. The experimental technique known as direct detection (DD) will play a pivotal role in shedding light on the nature of dark matter during the next decade. It searches for nuclear recoil events induced by the non-relativistic scattering of Milky Way dark matter particles in low-background detectors. An effective theory approach is a solid strategy to interpret DD experiments when the momentum transferred in the dark matter scattering by nuclei is small compared to the mass of the particle mediating the interaction. In this talk I compare a recently developed non-relativistic effective theory for dark matter-nucleon interactions to current DD data, including the observation of a modulation signal in the nuclear recoil energy spectrum reported by the DAMA collaboration. Emphasis will be placed on the strength of the proposed effective theory approach and on how it compares to the standard paradigm for DD.